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Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Under Saturn

Do not because this day I have grown saturnineImagine that some lost love, unassailableBeing a portion of my youth, can make me pineAnd so forget the comfort that no words can tellYour coming brought; though I acknowledge that I have goneOn a fantastic ride...

Had I but html skills enough... that sounds like the twenty-first-century poem-opening Yeats never got to write, doesn’t it, but had I (etc.), then I’d love to take an Olsonian pliers to the Yeats poem ‘Under Saturn’ and explode it all over the page, the better to illustrate the remarkable interplay of its opening between the line, as unit, and the clause, or unit of sense. Consider line two, ‘Imagine that some lost love, unassailable’, and the (slightly ungrammatical, granted) pathos it communicates, read on its own. But of course we must ‘not’ imagine; and even so, we have another interim reading, before continuing the sentence, in the thought of that provisional strong imperative: ‘Do not imagine that lost love!’ Consider too how a listener might supply a mental comma after ‘Being’ in line three, turning this memory of lost love into an ‘unassailable /Being, a portion of my youth’. And look at ‘the comfort that no words can tell’ and how it rubs up against ‘the comfort that no words can tell /Your coming brought’, and in particular the delay on ‘brought’. ‘No words can tell /Your coming’, never mind your parting, we might feel, momentarily, but no (wait for it), it is the comfort ‘Your coming [pause] brought’. And on it goes: ‘though I acknowledge that I have gone’. So you’ve gone too? ‘Gone /On a fantastic ride’. And how are we to scan the second-last line?

You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He saidUpon the open road, near to the Sligo quay—No, no, not said, but cried it out—“You have come againAnd surely after twenty years it was time to come.”I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vainNever to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

Do the six stresses go on ‘I’, ‘think’, ‘child’s’, ‘vow’, ‘sworn’ and ‘vain’, hurrying through the anapest of ‘of a child’s’ only to stop almost dead on the two catalectic feet (on this reading) of ‘vow’ and ‘scorn’? Or how do you read it? Note that the valley is not home, it is the place ‘his fathers called their home’, and how the vow is credited not to the speaker but an externalized version of himself, ‘a child’. The unspoken subtext is the speaker’s anxiety that there is no home to return to, any more, only the off-balance, absent centre Yeats has so skilfully imitated in his constant shifting of his lines’ centre of semantic gravity, both proleptically and retrospectively. It is a marvellous performance.

4 comments:

Thanks very much for that poem Puthwuth (which I confess I do not remember reading). I have just read it now in my 1983 G&M 'The Poems'. I like that very apt phrase of yours "...constant shifting of his lines’ centre of semantic gravity." But, strangely, you seem to be quoting another (later or earlier?) version. In the G&M book the first part of the poem goes:

Do not because this day I have grown saturnineImagine that lost love, inseparable from my thoughtBecause I have no other youth, can make me pine;For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought,The comfort that you made? Although my wits have goneOn a fantastic ride...

No mention of "unassailable" and it's his "wits" that have gone on a ride. And nothing in the notes at the back of the book. I googled the poem and all the versions online seem to be of the other one (i.e. not yours). What gives?

Regarding how to scan the second-last line, personally I find it falls more naturally into a loose iambic, as does the third line in both versions. The heptameter in these lines seems a little strained to my ear. But I guess Yeats may well have intended that, for the poem to be read (or heard) as 'high talk', dramatic, rhetorical etc.

Aha! I cut and pasted from an online source and am abashed to see I hadn't noticed the differences from the Macmillan Collected Poems. My other editions are at work, where I'll check tomorrow. I'm guessing Macmillan goes with a later revision from the 1921 Michael Robartes and the Dancer text, but will confirm this anon.

You say you hear heptameter in these last lines, even if it's strained. Does that mean you hear stresses on 'child's', 'vow', 'sworn' and 'vain'? Or should we hurry past 'vow' so as to squeeze it into a hexameter?

The first typescript WBY made from his drafts in November 1919 reads as follows:

Do not because this day I have grown saturnineImagine that some lost love, unassailableBeing a portion of my youth, can make me pineAnd so forget the comfort that no words can tellYour coming brought; though I acknowledge I have goneOn a fantastic ride I swear my horse's flanks were spurredBy childish memories of an old cross PollexfenAnd of a Middleton whose name you never heardAnd of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he diedBefore my time, seem like a vivid memory.You heard that labouring man who had served my people; he saidUpon the open road, near to the Sligo quay - No, no - not said, but cried it out - "You have come againAnd surely after twenty years it was time to come".I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vainNever to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

This was the text printed in The Dial in November 1920, and then in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala 1921).

The text Mark quotes comes from the two volume Collected Poems published in 1949.

For earlier drafts see the Cornell edition of the manuscripts, edited by Thomas Parkinson with Anne Brannen, 1994.